Justice News

Savannah Man Sentenced For Distributing Child Pornography

Memphis, TN – Kenneth Wayne Johnson, age 48, of Savannah, Tenn., was sentenced to 121 months in federal prison Tuesday following his guilty plea to one count of distribution of child pornography, announced U.S. Attorney Edward L. Stanton III.

According to the facts alleged in the indictment and revealed during the sentencing hearing, from November of 2011 to July of 2012, Johnson used a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program on a computer connected to the internet to seek out images of child pornography and download them to his computer. Once the images were downloaded to Johnson’s computer, they became available for download by others using similar programs. On several occasions, undercover law enforcement agents in Virginia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee were able to use such a program to download illicit images from Johnson’s computer. Johnson was downloading the images at his place of employment, copying the images to a thumb drive, and then transferring them to his home computer.

In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Judge S. Thomas Anderson ordered Johnson to serve five years of supervised release, forfeit all computers and media containing alleged child pornography, and pay $2,668 in restitution to identified victims depicted in the pornographic images. There is no parole in the federal prison system.

This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations and the Jackson Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Debra Ireland represented the government.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood (PSC), a nationwide initiative of the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, PSC marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about PSC, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc/. For more information about internet safety education, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc/resources.html and click on the tab “resources.”